AFRICAN AMERICANS VIEW SENEGAL AS ANCESTRAL HOMELAND AND BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
Unlike Ghana, Senegal has not made an explicit appeal for members of the African diaspora to return. It is a French-speaking country, which makes it less of a natural choice for African Americans
Nellie Peyton |
Publication 23/06/2021
A few months after discovering from a DNA test that most of his ancestors were from west Africa, American businessman Kyle Jones got on a flight to Dakar, Senegal.
The coastal city was unfamiliar, from the language, to the dusty streets packed with motorcycles, horse carts, and hawkers, but he immediately felt at home.
“There’s sort of a spiritual connection,” said Jones, the chief operating officer of ESS Group, a professional training and development company near Atlanta.
“To come back and to instantly connect with the land, the culture, the people, was an amazing feeling. It filled a gap which I had been searching for all my life,” he told Quartz Africa in an interview.
Jones was one of about 75 people including business leaders, mayors, and entrepreneurs from the US who came to Dakar this week for “The Return,” a seven-day event spearheaded by the organization NuWorld. The goal was to encourage members of the African diaspora to return to the continent, both as a form of healing, and to build social and economic ties. NuWorld is an umbrella platform encompassing various programs and initiatives led by American entrepreneur Andre Amos.
It was inspired by similar initiatives in Ghana, whose president Nana Akufo-Addo declared 2019 the “Year of Return” to commemorate 400 years since the first arrival of enslaved Africans in the US. Ghana staged a marketing campaign throughout the year and saw tourist figures rise by 45% compared to the previous year, though it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how many visitors came directly as a result of the campaign. As part of the initiative it granted citizenship to more than 100 African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.
“It was very successful in Ghana and we wanted to do the same here in Senegal,” said the NuWorld coordinator of the event, Shantel Gilbert, to Quartz Africa.
